Ingmar's last word

Last week, nearly the entire population of Sweden sat around their television sets to watch Saraband, the final film by one of the great auteurs: Ingmar Bergman. In Sweden, Bergman is a fractious but revered figure, most of whose recent work has been for the stage in Stockholm: Strindberg, Shakespeare and, famously, Mary Stuart. Indeed, Saraband is staged more as drama than cinema. Texturally, it occupies the emotional twilight, the zone of eclipsed intensity, that makes Bergman the Strindberg of the screen.

But the film, made for television, also reads like the concluding chapter in a cinematic autobiography. Revisiting Bergman's classic Scenes from a Marriage (1973), Saraband shows a now elderly but radiant Marianne (Liv Ullman) seeking out her haunted former husband, Johan (Erland Josephson).

The drama's opening scenes suggest a director bidding farewell. As Marianne explores the apparently empty house, doors slam shut, a cuckoo clock chirps: there is a sense of time irretrievably passed, life locked away. The narrative then twists as claustrophobically as one would expect (or fear) from Bergman. Living in a nearby boathouse is Johan's son from another marriage, Henrik, and Henrik's adolescent daughter, Karin, who are locked into a possessive andabusive relationship. Johan in turn despises his son, tolerating him only for the sake of Henrik's deceased wife, Anna, whose spectre haunts the film and comes to intrigue Marianne.

As its title (from Bach's suites for cello) suggests, the film develops primarily through the power of music, here both jailer and liberator. The only scene in which Henrik achieves humanity is when Marianne catches him playing a chapel organ. And yet, Henrik coaches Karin into a lonely solo career as a means to imprison her. When Karin fails to perform a Bach cello suite to her father's standards and is molested, the child breaks from Henrik's slobbering kiss to announce that she is leaving to join an orchestra in Hamburg. She rejects this life of perverted, destructive seclusion for the real world.

The catalyst of Karin's rebellion is the discovery of a letter from Anna to Henrik, urging her daughter's freedom. This pivotal role of the dead woman is the autobiographical kernel of Bergman's final film. The director, as is well known, lives on the island of Faro in the Baltic - anxious, comfortless, in mourning for his deceased wife, Ingrid, who was perhaps the only person to tame his infamous arrogance. In Saraband, the most cogent figure is the absent character.

But there is another person hidden from the film. Marianne, inspired by her role in Karin's liberation, goes to visit her own daughter - forgotten, locked in a mental hospital. It is an act of kindness that selfishly fulfils the mother, but comes too late for the child, who shuts her eyes, retreating into the world of neglected darkness in which she was abandoned. A Bergman valedictory, then, of one liberation in bitter counterpoint to another young life destroyed; a swan song of contrition at the damage people do to each other.